Best of 2017 lists from 20 KC music influencers

Bookends. They’re an important part of moving on. As the year winds down, “Best of” lists are everywhere and create closure for us, letting us look back on the best music and concerts that we experienced this year.

Overall, it was a weird year -- a year where a lot of people cut their cords on their TVs and put the news on mute, hoping perhaps that it would all change if they looked away. By the looks of everyone’s social media feeds a couple weeks ago, when people were posting their Spotify year-end, “X of minutes listened” and “top 5 bands and songs” screenshots, it looks like lots of people started logging some serious minutes on the streaming service, perhaps as a nice escape.

Every year, we lose more of the legends that have inspired our lives and our love of music. For me, the one that still stings the most is losing the great Tom Petty. He passed away in October after playing one of my favorite shows of the year in June at Sprint Center. Also losing Charles Bradley, “the screaming eagle of soul” who we were lucky to have headline Middle of the Map Fest in 2016, passed away in September. Other marquee names: Grant Hart, Glen Campbell, Malcolm Young, Gregg Allman, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. And then there’s Chris Cornell, he died just a few days after he played right here in KC at Starlight back in May. Some of these greats died with concert dates on the books, in moments like this I’m reminded of the slogan of a KC-based Twitter account, @KCConcerts, “Life is short. Buy the damn concert tickets.”

To wrap up this year, we reached out to several music influencers in the Kansas City area and asked them to submit their best of lists to us. We got submissions back from about 20 people. We asked for their favorite albums of 2017, favorite shows of 2017, favorite local releases of 2017 and a few other variations on those things. Have a look below, pull up your Spotify account, open up YouTube and start studying. Hopefully, you find some great new music to listen to as we ride off into the sunset of 2017.